The Pump Room, Bath

John Claude Nattes must have taken his view of the Pump Room on an unusually quiet day if we are to believe Jane Austen’s description of Catherine Morland, her heroine in 'Northanger Abbey', hurrying there in hope of meeting her dashing Mr Tilney:

“Every creature in Bath, except himself, was to be seen in the Room at different periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down; people whom nobody cared about, and nobody wanted to see; and he only was absent.”

Nattes’ view show the classical façade of the Pump Room built by Thomas Baldwin and John Palmer in the 1790s to replace the first building.